HP to cut up to 30,000 jobs as it splits into two - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/business/2015/09/hp-to-cut-up-to-30000-jobs-as-it-splits-into-two/ <comment><USER2> Imo the way they thought and executed made HP failed, i do hope 30K includes all bad decision makers.</comment>


Breaking up is hard to do: Chrome separates from Chrome OS - <AUTHOR> https://www.zdnet.com/article/breaking-up-is-hard-to-do-chrome-separates-from-chrome-os/ <comment><USER2> "You see, today when you buy a Chromebook, it comes with an end-of-life date, its Auto Update Expiration (AUE) date. This is a generous six and a half years after any specific Chromebook is released." -article

This language is insane. This should not be considered generous in any way by a tech journalist. Windows XP, 12 years. Windows 7, 10 years with free migration to Windows 10. Neither are a posion pill to the hardware itself. Desktops/Laptops of the last decade are still remarkably capable devices today for most light workloads. Linux provides a whole other world of possibilities as well.

<comment><USER3> The chrome books of 2013 which are still receiving updates (mine does, at least) are quite limited - 2GB of ram including video memory, 32 bit arm, 16GB flash, not expendable (very typical chrome book for the time, two hundred bucks). The things from that time that run Windows acceptably are those that have had their ram and disk upgraded, or were high end at the time.

<comment><USER4> How are you still receiving updates? We bought one ~3 yrs ago and recently got the message that support was ending. I assumed that was the case across the board.

Anyway, the sketchy part of this is that it's referring to time of (initial) release, not time of purchase. These things continue to be sold well after initial release. When that was is also not something most users are aware of or care about. Arbitrarily losing a few years of support because you unknowingly picked the wrong model stinks.

That is exactly the situation that we are in. Like your Chromebook, this one is still perfect for its purpose and would have continued to be for years if not for this crap.

<comment> m-p-3 > These things continue to be sold well after initial release.

They should be forced to put the EOL date on the packaging and on the hardware. I'm sure the average buyer is not even aware of it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> What's the "Chrome with more wayland support" part about? Why wouldn't that be in all builds of linux-chromium, since major distros are trying to (or already) transition to Wayland? Is there something weird about exosphere that normal Wayland doesn't support?</comment>


Learning how to get past paywall from doing SEO work - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/teamzerolabs/got-a-story-you-want-to-see-here-is-one-trick-to-get-the-full-story-p-s-dont-tell-anyone-8196de50b563 <comment><USER2> The whole article describing manually setting User-Agent to:

      Googlebot Smartphone

There are convenient browser extensions for selectively setting UA. And some sites visually break after this.</comment>


Webcam Shield - <AUTHOR> https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1893116150/nope-live-free

<comment><USER2> Over engineering a solution, still it has identified people with more money than sense. Of course aiming it at macbook owners and you can assume there are plenty of those in your target market.

<comment><AUTHOR> Why do you think this is over engineering, what do you use for this? Personally I tried duct tape, which leaves glue marks, and tends to become ineffective over the not-so-short term…

<comment><USER2> electrical tape

<comment><AUTHOR> Not viable in my experience.

<comment><USER2> Works fine for me, is cheap, easily replaceable, comes in a variety of colours.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> I wonder what they'll spend $26k on.</comment>


Why do we value gold? (2013) - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-25255957 <comment><USER2> Another thing good about gold is the fact that you can't carve off a piece, even with the best knives. I learned this on a tour of the federal reserve gold depository. The guide passed around a brick of gold (very very heavy) and said he wasn't worried about anyone stealing a piece of it.

</comment><comment><USER3> Past discussion: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6869483](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6869483)</comment>


Inspired by UsesThis I created this site for Hacker News - <AUTHOR> http://hnsetups.com Inspired by usesthis.com and the response here http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1880797 I created this site: http://hnsetups.com/<p>Feedback welcome! It's a little sparse, so design advice would be extra helpful. <comment><USER2> Dave did a nice job on this. I found that it summarizes me pretty well, so I'm going to add a link on my profile that points to it. Might be kind of nice to have it automatically do that a la hackernewsers.

</comment><comment><USER3> I would suggest requiring a token in one's profile to prove authenticity.</comment>


The Cost of Self Publication, Ebook vs. Print: One Person's Story - <AUTHOR> http://www.smartbitchestrashybooks.com/index.php/weblog/comments/the-cost-of-self-publication-ebook-vs-print-one-persons-story/ <comment><AUTHOR> Good info... horrible website design.</comment>


Mark Zuckerbarg: The Dictator no one choose - <AUTHOR> https://www.geek.com/tech/pirate-bay-founder-says-zuckerberg-is-the-biggest-dictator-in-the-world-1720817/ <comment><USER2> peter sunde seems a bit loopy these days.

"He repeated his claim that the internet began life as a nearly-perfect and free place." \- in what universe did this happen? it got developed by DARPA ffs...

""We've centralized all of our data to a guy called Mark Zuckerberg, who's basically the biggest dictator in the world as he wasn't elected by anyone."" \- everyone choses by free will to submit their data. and even if you didnt, your data would end up in the same place as the whole of the internet is tapped on the backbone...

"Dictator definition, a person exercising absolute power, especially a ruler who has absolute, unrestricted control in a government without hereditary succession."

None of this applies to zuckerberg. So wtf is he talking about with such a statement? Seems like just childish behaviour at best.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> What I fear the most is "Absolute power corrupts absolutely". I feel like facebook being a corporation is not in hand of one, But still, if someone has to do wrong or misuse it they can just fuck the world in a night or two.

</comment><comment><USER3> Zuckerberg, at least as far as his public persona goes, appears to have no personality at all.

</comment><comment><USER4> Zuck is a kingmaker, not a dictator. Hopefully, he won't ever abuse that power.</comment>


SVN vs. Mercurial vs. Git For Managing Your Home Directory - <AUTHOR> http://joshcarter.com/productivity/svn_hg_git_for_home_directory <comment><USER2> Linus Torvalds actually said Git was probably a bad idea for doing the home directory thing, but that hasn't stopped people from trying. I'd be interested to hear more first-hand stories from other hackers doing the same thing.

<comment><USER3> One of the problems is Git cannot handle multi-gig files, so if your home includes some virtual machines that you want backed up/sync'd amongst computers, then Git can't be your whole solution.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> It would have been nice to also see the numbers for Bazaar, which seems to be #3 on the list of mainstream DVCSs. I adopted hg for $HOME a few months ago, and it's working great. This was after having used SVN for a few years for the same task. I might have chosen bzr for it's amazing attention to usability, but at the time it had some performance issues with 'log'. Although Git has quite a following, I just couldn't adopt it given its enourmous command set (140+ commands), and manual heuristics for when to repack.

<comment><USER5> Unfortunately, bzr is still pretty slow at log. It's also slow at branching a remote repo, and subsequent merges or pulls from that remote repo. On the bright side, it used to be unusably slow (for large projects, anyway) when doing things like status, diff, or commit, but these have all become considerably faster in recent releases, so there's hope that the still-slow commands will become fast in the future too.

I agree with you about usability. Nearly everything in bzr just works, which was why I ultimately decided against using hg (no dumb server support? ouch!) or git (where you need to understand its internals far too well in order to get anything done).

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I always see Mercurial vs Git, but no one ever talks about Monotone, considering it was a major influence on git. Its kind of disappoint b/c its a really great scm.

<comment><USER2> And it's not like nobody's using it. The Pidgin developers are using it.

Side note: <http://www.monotone.ca> lists Git/Cogito as an alternative, but not plain Git.</comment></comment>


Golang CLI to browser HackerNews stories - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/drgarcia1986/gonews <comment><AUTHOR> It's one of my first projects in Golang. I'll work for more features like show story content on terminal.</comment>


Show HN: Launching my product in Japan - <AUTHOR> http://blog.limelightapp.com/post/11677655878/introducing-limelight-in-japan

<comment><USER2> Congrats. Just some feedbacks.

\- I don't know if "ショーケースサイト" will be understood. Actually the most I learned what Limelight is was by mousing over the tab and reading the title in the tooltip.

\- If you click "blog" you get English.

\- If you click "mailing list" you get English.

\- The pricing plan is in US dollars.

\- I wanted to follow your Japanese twitter account, but there were no tweets.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks so much. I had the same thought on ショーケースサイト but ultimately left it up to the translator. (He'll see the feedback here.) I'll update the pricing to be the rough equivalent and address the other concerns, too. Please do follow us on Twitter, we'll be posting there in the future. (I've just added a Tweet now.)

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Not sure if this is interesting to others here, but I've been studying Japanese as a hobby for years and have visited a couple of times. Having the chance to launch a product there is really a bit of a dream come true. :)

This was possible with the help of a friend who agreed to translate the site and help market it there in exchange for a commission on the sales there.

<comment><USER3> Congratulations.

Unfortunately, this translation is too direct. There is no culture in the text and it feels weird.

Do you have a Japanese person manning your telephones? You list a 1-866 number on the site, but be prepared to answer the phones in Japanese.

Japanese people are very tolerant of the outside world and English -- you would be better off working on PR in Japan and keeping your site in English than translating into mediocre Japanese.

If you make the jump to support the Japanese, they expect that you support them in every means possible or else they will not even attempt to contact you. If you show yourselves in English, they will be more kind and understanding.

If I were you I would immediately take this site down and work on PR in Japan. Come over here and meet with folks.

Japanese people love foreign technology and would be happy to accommodate you. Be careful to not offend Japanese people by using their language and culture incorrectly.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks so much for the feedback.

The translation was written by a native-Japanese friend who was born, raised, and currently lives in Japan. (I'm sure he'll see the feedback here.) If you've got more specific feedback on the translation or copywriting, I'm sure he would appreciate it and it would help our efforts.

We'll have a direct support line in Japan soon. In the meantime if a Japanese- speaker did call the number we've got listed, we should be able to solve any problem or answer any question they have the same way we would for our English-speaking customers.

I'll take your advice about coming over there. :) I'd love a chance to meet more developers over there. I actually just missed a chance to come back over recently to visit one of our consulting clients in Yokohama because the meeting was too soon after my daughter's birth. Let me know if you can think of any events in particular that would be good to attend.

To your point about PR, though: Publishing the site in Japanese (even as a work in progress) is a part of our efforts to do PR in Japan. Launching the site enabled us to get coverage on Penn-Olson (<http://www.penn- olson.com/2011/10/20/limelight/>) which I'm hoping will help lead to some Japanese-language coverage as well.

Again, thanks so much for the time you took to provide the feedback!

<comment><USER3> Trust me when I say that you should take down the JP site immediately. Your friend might be "native-Japanese," but he or she is only directly translating your text from English.

The biggest part might be simply that you are not incorporated inside of Japan. It's fine to state your fondness of Japanese culture to the JP press, but if you want to get serious about Japan, get incorporated and let your Japanese 代表 ("daihyou") take care of things for you.

The worst thing you could do in Japan is release a (in your words) "Work in Progress." Keep things that are incomplete in the labs and refine them until they are ready for society to enjoy. Japanese society is all about keeping risk low for oneself, one's partners and especially the general public.

If you are really serious about Japan, feel free to drop me a line. If you really think that directly translating English to Japanese will add value to your company, you are gravely mistaken.

Remember to manage your customer's expectations. If they expect you to be a Japanese company and you are not one, you are in for a world of hurt.

<comment><USER4> I have to agree that, there is no mistake when translation became a degree in many universities all over the world. It's not something that could be mastered simply by knowing two languages (even native speaker of both)

I think for the 代表 part of things, it applies to any places in Asia, almost. You can't pretty much get around anything if you don't have a local to sort things out for you. Either partner with one or hire some for this matter.

<comment><USER3> Most definitely.

Localization is much more than a simple translation. The title of this post should really read: "Launching my product in Japanese"

Good luck to the OP!</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


"At Will" at All Costs: The VA Supreme Court Favors Flexibility Over Decency - <AUTHOR> https://casetext.com/posts/at-will-at-all-costs-the-virginia-supreme-court-favors-flexibility-over-decency <comment><USER2> Employment at-will doesn't really bother me, but I wish both resignation notice when worker leaves and severance package when employer terminates employee were legally mandatory.

It is usually expected to give 2 week notice / severance, but nothing really enforces that as far as I know.</comment>


ArXiv preprint server plans multimillion-dollar overhaul - <AUTHOR> http://www.nature.com/news/arxiv-preprint-server-plans-multimillion-dollar-overhaul-1.20181 <comment><USER2> I really hope the directors never let the commenting and ratings features get past the "consideration" phase.

</comment><comment><USER3> In other words, it will soon be unusable.</comment>


Dynamic projection mapping onto deforming non-rigid surface [video] - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-bh1MHuA5jU&feature=youtu.be <comment><USER2> Quick, name three uses for this technology that aren't annoying advertisements!

<comment><AUTHOR> Oh, hahaha. But seriously. Lots of events , entertainment and art things. And i suspect some kind of complex measuring of things. Exactly what i'm not sure</comment></comment>


Andreessen Horowitz-Backed Leap Buses Are Hitting SF Streets This Week - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2015/03/17/leap-buses <comment><USER2> _Leap buses are not also currently accessible to wheelchair-using or disabled passengers, but Kirchhoff plans to add that in future buses._

They redesigned the entire bus interior from the ground up and didn't include this? Surely if you are going to rebuild your fleet before you start, it is insane not to do the work then. Doing it in the future will be far more expensive and is a difficult decision to make, given you will have to pull a presumably profitable bus from a route for each revamp.

(edited for spelling)

<comment><USER3> You make it sound like they completely forgot about disabled passengers, when the reality is almost certainly that they intentionally excluded them because they are a pain to deal with (slow getting on and off, take up more space than an able bodied passenger etc.)

<comment><USER2> The article presents it as though it was merely an unfortunate oversight. I assumed incompetence rather than maliciousness for my comment, purely out of a sudden fit of politeness.

I completely agree however that assuming pure idiocy rather than malignancy is stretching probability more than slightly in this case, given we are talking about highly experienced profiteers.

<comment><USER4> The article says they "bought old NABI buses and refurbished them"

Replacing seats doesn't need structural changes to the bus - but if you've brought a coach that has six steps and a sharp right turn as you board, there's just no way to adapt them.

<comment><USER2> There is a very wide range of choices if looking to buy an old bus.

If someone is planning a transport company, and they buy a coach with six steps and a sharp right, then belatedly realise _' oh-noes, I can't refit for wheelchairs'_, and cannot fix this by getting a different bus, despite having lots of investment and only one route, then I start to disbelieve the narrative if I also think that any of the executives can tie their own shoes.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Wow. All you guys need in SF is _more_ ticketing systems. There is already what? 3? 4? In places like e.g. Germany, you have _one_ ticketing system being serviced by different companies that all bid for the slots based on their costs (including the official railway service DB) without inconviniencing the customer.

<comment><USER6> It bugs me an unreasonable amount when people misuse eg.

> In places like e.g. Germany, you have...

This is not the correct way to do it, and it makes it look as though you're trying too hard. You're using a fancy latin word, but you're using it wrong.

[http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/e.g](http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/e.g).

The way to write that sentence would have been:

In other places around the world e.g. Germany, you have...

Sorry for the rant. I see this on HN all the time. It's not just you. It's unreasonable for me to be annoyed by it and even moreso if I do nothing to address it.

<comment><USER5> I'm very sorry dear sir, english is by far not my native language (I'm pretty glad you got fooled though), I will try to do better next time and please accept my apologies

EDIT: Wiktionary does not yet have an entry for e.g.

<comment><USER6> No need to apologize, I'm the one being unreasonable!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> A bus for people who think public transportation is great aside from all those poor black people.

</comment><comment><USER8> With the obvious disclaimers about the TOC and potential safety issues I do like the overall idea. I commute roughly 50 minutes each way by train and prefer it a lot over going by car even if a car is more felxible. The major benefit for me is that I can read (or use my laptop).

I think the "open area" and especially the "opt in share info stuff" has the potential to be the most game changing. I'd really enjoy commuting even more if I had the option to socialize with interesting people. The typical train layout and general no-contact atmosphere on trains isn't really helping much.

Especially in SV I can imagine some quite interesting discussions and talks while commuting. In fact I could imagine riding that bus even if I didn't have to travel which is a pretty good sign.

Aside from "not a travel company/safety" concerns my biggest issue is scale. Doesn't look like a ton of people fit on these buses. It might also work better for longer routes than the typical inner city stuff (plenty of people living outside core SV that wouldn't mind long route buses I'd guess)

</comment><comment><USER9> I'll be interested to see how this works from afar in New York. To my mind it's likely to just make for more traffic and not take a sizable number of cars off the road, but I'd love to be proven wrong.

<comment><USER10> Why would you think it would just make more traffic and not take cars off the road?

A bus takes up the space of 3-4 cars. If there are more than 4 people on the bus, it is increasing the capacity of the road. Surely there are some negative effects because busses stop & take longer to turn, but I also don't think their business plan involves driving busses with only 4 people on them.

<comment><USER4> "Emergent demand" is the idea that there are people who would like to drive in the centre of big cities, and the only reason they don't is because the congestion is so bad.

This often comes up in the context of building more roads to alleviate congestion. It won't work, the theory goes, because when congestion reduces more people start driving, until the congestion reaches equilibrium again.

If buses take cars off the street and reduce congestion, the same argument applies; emergent demand will mean any cars taken off the street will soon be replaced.

Personally emergent demand has always struck me as a rather defeatist idea :)

<comment><USER11> > It won't work, the theory goes, because when congestion reduces more people > start driving, until the congestion reaches equilibrium again.

While this sounds plausible, it doesn't follow that building roads or adding buses is a bad idea. Even if the congestion stays constant, now _more people_ get to travel.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> When tech VCs get into the public transit business, that's a good indicator that we are in a bubble. I was in SF for the 1999-2000 bubble. This reminds me a lot of that.

There isn't much upside in a business like this, but there is a huge amount of hassle (just wait until someone sues them for ADA incompliance, and they will).

Note also the skin tone of the featured passengers. As someone who rides public transit in SF and NY daily, I'd rather see attention focused on improving public transit, versus privileged white people who live in the Marina transit.

</comment><comment><USER13> Can someone please explain the benefit of having Wifi on a bus? I know for some the bus ride may be long, especially if you're going from the SoMA to the Outer Sunset or Richmond. But in most cases I've used MUNI there it's 10 minute bus ride, even going from the Haight to Soma. There is an argument to be made for getting work done, but how much work care you possibly going to get done on a 10-15 minute bus ride?

<comment><USER14> The reason is (probably) simply avoiding having bored passengers.

You can cringe and say that people ought to be able to withstand a 15 minute ride without needing a dopamine hit, but if you're making a business out of it, providing Wifi is a cheap way of increasing customer happiness and loyalty.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> There's like 3 cities in the US with pretty good public transportation and they choose to launch in one of those?

<comment><USER7> You need a critical mass of hipsters for something like this to work. SF is the perfect launch city.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> I'm interested to see the next evolutionary step in transit.

I would have gone with the "dollar van" model would be a better entry. Cargo vans are less expensive to own/maintain than busses, more nimble, and use less fuel.

Either way, more options is great for the consumer.

</comment><comment><USER17> I like the marshrutka private busses prevalent in Russia:

[http://www.saint-petersburg.com/transport/marshrutka/](http://www.saint- petersburg.com/transport/marshrutka/)

</comment><comment><USER18> Previous discussion: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9220210](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9220210)

</comment><comment><USER19> Hopefully more busses, any busses, will cut down on traffic in SF.

</comment><comment><USER20> It seems like San Francisco is one of the few places where you can have a company completely fail, only to see it revamp its product in a way that it will probably completely fail again.

While I can't speak for San Francisco's bus system, everything about this product video screams to me that the solution that is being provided here does not actually solve a problem other than "I am white, privileged, and want to ride on a fancy looking bus where I can buy a Vita Coco. I also want to pay as much as $6 per ride, which is egregiously more expensive than something that amounts to little more than public transit needs to be."

This whole thing is basically the epitome of the tech bubble and offers little to nothing of real value.

<comment><USER21> An alternative comment (that would likely be more useful and spark more interesting conversation) might focus on listing the ways in which you see public transportation in SF as broken, and thoughts on how they might be sustainably (and profitably) fixed.

<comment><USER22> It's not clear to me that profitability is a useful metric in thinking about how to fix public transportation, unless one is running a transportation startup.

<comment><USER6> Well it's useful in the sense that if an alternative transportation company as opposed to a city enterprise is able to turn a profit, that would indicate something.

I think it would indicate that the city isn't making enough of an effort on the mass transit side of things.

Overall it would be great if people could start up private bus lines that they believe are underserved which the city would then later take over. If you structure it so that the city paid a royalty to the entity which established the line for a few years, they could probably do a fair amount of good.

Now, how would you prevent this from turning into a tollway that's only going to charge for 20 years but 50 years later it's still for-pay? By making the city pay an external entity rather than keeping the revenue. They'll keep their word -- at least when it comes to paying the bus startup -- very rigidly if it's an outflow. How would you ensure that they then lower the price once the royalty is done? That's harder. I guess at least the scam would be more transparent that way.

<comment><USER23> >If you structure it so that the city paid a royalty to the entity which established the line for a few years, they could probably do a fair amount of good.

This is very much how the UK's rail franchising system fails to work.

Rail is complex because you have obvious economies of scale when you have the same entity managing rolling stock, tracks, other resources, and R&D.

The UK's rail franchising is the worst of all possible worlds. Economies of scale are impossible because separate companies own the rolling stock, run the rolling stock, and maintain the track. And no R&D happens at all now.

Worse, companies regularly scam the gov by collecting subsidies while they can and giving up franchises early when they're expected to start repaying some of their profits.

So this is not necessarily a good model.

>I think it would indicate that the city isn't making enough of an effort on the mass transit side of things.

Why should public transport be profitable? It provides a valuable economic service, in that it moves employees to and from work.

Demanding that it should make a profit is like demanding that pedestrian walkways or the freeway system should make a profit.

Infrastructure is a public and corporate good. You can certainly debate who benefits from it the most, and who should pay for it on the basis of the economic value of those benefits.

You can also debate if perhaps it's not as innovative as it could be - something which is often true of both public and private transport systems.

But there's no obvious non-ideological need for it to be run on a for-profit basis.

<comment><USER6> Perhaps I wasn't clear. I would like MORE bus service and cities are generally run by fear of screwing up or looking stupid. It would be nice if enterprising people could start new routes, and then once they prove profitable then they would be turned over to the city who would use their own rolling stock to run the route.

This would enable the people starting the bus route to then do market analysis and use the same buses to go start yet another new route which could then either be profitable or not, and then get taken over or not. So you're organizing the company to take the risk and that means the city doesn't have to, which means that some kind of progress might get made in less than a person's lifetime.

Yes I do realize that profit != socially useful in all contexts. But I think in this case if a bus route can be run profitably there's going to be a substantial correlation with useful, because I can't think of a way that buses have been able to hack capitalism to extract rents without doing any useful work.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> duplicate of [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9219672](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9219672)

<comment><USER25> It doesn't count as a duplicate (for burying purposes) until the story has had significant attention. However, [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9220210](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9220210) did have.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> I predict there will be protesting.</comment>


Why Minimal Guidance During Instruction Does Not Work (2006) [pdf] - <AUTHOR> http://www.cogtech.usc.edu/publications/kirschner_Sweller_Clark.pdf <comment><USER2> After skimming the paper, I get the sense that there's this underlying assumption that the goal of education is to get students to learn specific facts, i.e. that a physics student should learn the formula that force equals mass times acceleration.

While there is of course lots of value in ensuring that students can learn specific facts and figures, the criticism (if I recall correctly) is that an approach that dictates specificity of recall as the end goal is not an approach that induces a lifelong love of learning. Most of the value in an experiential-based approach is not limited to the specificity of facts learned during the experiences, but in the cognitive linking of learning with the dynamism of the experience, which encourages independent growth.

This leads back to the philosophical question of whether our school systems should focus on graduating students who know specific knowledge (an approach that leads to standardized testing), or students who have become independently capable lifelong learners (a more holistic approach that tries to adapt to students' individual strengths). Which approach better prepares students for life after school, and equally important, which approach can prove to scale to the levels required for public education?

<comment><USER3> I've increasingly come to value mastering the basics.[0]

A quote from Michael Nielsen in his great article Augmenting Long-Term Memory ([http://augmentingcognition.com/ltm.html](http://augmentingcognition.com/ltm.html)) puts it very well:

"Over the years, I've often helped people learn technical subjects such as quantum mechanics. Over time you come to see patterns in how people get stuck. One common pattern is that people think they're getting stuck on esoteric, complex issues. But when you dig down it turns out they're having a hard time with basic notation and terminology."

[0] I suspect individuals who learn things relatively easily may undervalue that skill, because they typically were ahead in school.

<comment><USER4> It isn't just the basics that need mastering, but all of it [1]

Adding knowledge to your own knowledge graph requires existing context, without context, there is no place for new knowledge to attach.

Without master, eventually the new knowledge is simply remembered and not fully understood. The knowledge front is a fixed distance from the last fully mastered concept.

It is ok to go slow, who cares how fast shaky knowledge is consumed. You want a building that will stand, not one that was built on time.

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mastery_learning](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mastery_learning)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> My knee-jerk instinct was to read this paper and take it as truth in the sense that it's "debunking a popular belief," much like the "types of learning" belief. However, this paper is 12 years old, so I was curious about whether there had been any responses. I found this blog entry, which seems to be relatively well-researched: [http://bdld.blogspot.com/2011/06/five-years- later-review-of-...](http://bdld.blogspot.com/2011/06/five-years-later-review- of-kirschner.html)

Especially of note is the section that states:

> The paper relies heavily on Cognitive Load Theory, yet we have to realize > that it is still a theory rather than a law.

The author also quotes Joel Michael to unpack some of the difficulties in studying educational methodology in general, which gave me some perspective. It's something I've thought about a lot since many Japanese people mourn the "yutori kyoiku" ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yutori_education](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yutori_education)) philosophy and I would often wonder which generations of students were a result of that system and which were simply molded by other social pressures.

<comment><USER6> I felt the paper's reliance on cognitive load theory was a bit problematic.

I'd have a different theory about the problems of "experiential learning" in a class room setting. I've taught myself a lot on my own and so the idea of exploratory learning always appealed to me. But all the experiential learning circumstances I've been exposed to just felt like tricks. The teacher has something in mind they want the student to learn, doesn't tell them exactly what that is, and still expects them to learn to exactly that thing, rather than some other things that the circumstances presented might teach the student.

Actually, this relates to a lot of contexts. One example is those terrible job interviews where the interviewer says something vague like "tell me about yourself" but expects to learn specific thing. Another is Role Playing Games (I'm an avid player of these). There's a classic problem where a dungeon master expects their players to explore a city and make a specific discovery with the clues given. That's typically much harder than the DM imagines and experienced DMs learn to just set-up situation and let whatever the players discover be what happens.

In general, I think a teacher or authority should say what they want in a learning or examination process, if they want a specific thing. Because if they don't say that, their idea of what a person would "naturally" discover through exploration might actually be _wrong_ , indeed given the natural variation in people's cognition, it probably is going to be wrong some large portion of the time for many students.

<comment><USER7> Cognitive load theory is fairly straightforward. People are able to handle 7±2 items in their working (short-term) memory at any one time. This means reliably 5 items. Subtract one for standard normal distractors. Thus students should not be expected to have to juggle more than 4 items at any one time. The problem here is that what an item is for a student is different than what an item is for an instructor. This is due to "chunking" (technical term from psychology). For the instructor, discovering what an item is especially difficult, as they may not be aware of what they had to learn to know what they now know. Personally I'm all for minimal guidance, but it has to be closely aligned to learning outcomes, and the instructor needs to understand what an item means for the student, if they are to have a hope of introducing less than four things at a time.

CLT is a solid theory with an extremely good basis. However understanding how to apply it is hard given the knowledge difference between student and instructor.

<comment><USER8> Cognitive load theory is unfalsifiable and has numerous conceptual and methodological problems: [https://edtechdev.wordpress.com/2009/11/16/cognitive-load- th...](https://edtechdev.wordpress.com/2009/11/16/cognitive-load-theory- failure/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> There have been numerous refutations of this opinion piece: [https://edtechdev.wordpress.com/2007/07/25/problem-based- lea...](https://edtechdev.wordpress.com/2007/07/25/problem-based-learning- videogames-inquiry-learning-constructivism-pedagogical-agents-all-bad/)

As well as criticisms of their central underlying theory, cognitive load theory, which is unfalsifiable: [https://edtechdev.wordpress.com/2009/11/16/cognitive-load- th...](https://edtechdev.wordpress.com/2009/11/16/cognitive-load-theory- failure/)

And there is a wealth of counter-evidence on how constructivist inspired teaching techniques (like active learning, inquiry learning, problem-based learning) and technologies (like simulations, modeling tools, games) are more effective for student learning: [https://edtechdev.wordpress.com/2015/04/03/evidence-for- vari...](https://edtechdev.wordpress.com/2015/04/03/evidence-for-various- research-based-instructional-strategies-countering-critiques/)

Unfortunately, fans of the neo-traditional perspective presented in this article plastered it all over Wikipedia 10 years ago, overwriting and ignoring any contrary evidence and opinions, leading to today: [https://edtechdev.wordpress.com/2007/12/26/an-argument- for-k...](https://edtechdev.wordpress.com/2007/12/26/an-argument-for-knols- over-wikipedia-and-citizendium/)

<comment><USER9> Excellent. Thank you.

Do you know of a handy (ELI5) layperson's explanation for state of the art learning techniques?

As a parent of K-12 students, what should I be advocating?

As a life-long learner, what style of courseware should I seek out?

As a person who has taught & mentored 100s of peers how to code, informally, what's are some strategies and techniques I should consider?

\--

A good friend teaches highschool physics using ASU's Modeling Instruction Program. He claims terrific results.

[http://modeling.asu.edu](http://modeling.asu.edu)

As a layperson, I can't make heads or tails of the online resources. What he describes, using the Socrates method in the classroom, sounds exciting. But I don't know enough to act on that tidbit.

<comment><USER10> By far the best summary of current learning research is available at the Bjork lab's website: [https://bjorklab.psych.ucla.edu/research/](https://bjorklab.psych.ucla.edu/research/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Interesting! The authors state their findings in the conclusions:

> After a half-century of advocacy associated with instruction using minimal > guidance, it appears that there is no body of research supporting the > technique. In so far as there is any evidence from controlled studies, it > almost uniformly sup- ports direct, strong instructional guidance rather > than constructivist-based minimal guidance during the instructions of novice > to intermediate learners.

I'm disappointed, though, that having a teacher who teaches physics by standing and talking in front of a class appears to be optimal. I wish there would be a more engaging alternative.

<comment><USER12> I don't know what level of physics you're taking, but the lecture portion is mostly motivational introduction (literally motivating particular types of solutions or insights), but it's not where you learn the details of models or techniques for solution. That is done in some combination of reading the text (before class), previous or concurrent math classes (algebra, calculus, analysis, linear algebra, ODE, complex analysis, PDE, abstract algebra each go really well with particular topics), recitation with a TA (where you can ask for aditional detailed questions), and homework sets (that you'll want to discuss with the TA as well). If you have good labs, you'll actually prove many of the relationships by experiment... and you'll see how hard it is to actually do science (there are so damn many ways to do physical things wrong!).

Like programming the details involve sitting down and cranking out the solutions and having the aha moments by yourself. It's easy to be wowed by a lecture, but if you can't teach it to someone else you don't really understand it.

<comment><USER11> You are right, our teacher / school could have combined upfront teaching with all the activities you've described!

<comment><USER12> Yeah, it can be frustrating. Try to develop friends with the same interest at multiple levels, and you can fill in some of the gaps yourself. Asking the professor during office hours what other learning opportunities they know of which will help the depth of the course may get you an advocate and a few suggestions. They may be frustrated and burned out too.

The most frustrated I ever saw professors were teaching pre-med, where the students literally only cared about the grades.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> > Evidence for the superiority of guided instruction is explained in the > context of our knowledge of human cognitive architecture, expert–novice > differences, and cognitive load. Although un- guided or minimally guided > instructional approaches are very popular and intuitively appeal- ing, the > point is made that these approaches ignore both the structures that > constitute human cognitive architecture and evidence from empirical studies > over the past half-century that con- sistently indicate that minimally > guided instruction is less effective and less efficient than in- structional > approaches that place a strong emphasis on guidance of the student learning > pro- cess. The advantage of guidance begins to recede only when learners > have sufficiently high prior knowledge to provide "internal" guidance. > Recent developments in instructional research and instructional design > models that support guidance during instruction are briefly described.

</comment><comment><USER14> This guy promotes evidence based education, meaning you can't "guess" or "hope" that an educational technique works, you have to be able to prove, demonstrate and repeatedly get effective results with your education. Direct instruction (from the little I know) works, and has been rigorously tested scientifically.

[http://measuredeffects.com/](http://measuredeffects.com/)

The quote on the home page:

> _" Far better an approximate answer to the right question, which is often > vague, than an exact answer to the wrong question, which can always be made > precise.

\--J.Tukey, 1962"_

</comment><comment><USER15> Coincidentally I just finished reading the section on minimal guidance in the great book, "How I Wish I'd Taught Maths" [1]

Here's the relevant bit:

\</comment><comment>---

 _Guided discovery lesson plans can be found on most topics in maths. Geometry is a particularly fertile breeding ground. Take something like circle theorems. Instead of simply explaining to students the Angle at the Centre relationship, why not have them discover it for themselves? Give them a set of blank circles, instructions to construct several formulations of the theorem, each time giving them complete freedom as to where they place their three points on the circumference, challenge them to measure the two relevant angles and then see what they notice. Students get important practice of measuring angles, a feeling of involvement in their own learning, and may even teach themselves a key GCSE topic without me needing to say a word. What could possibly go wrong?

I was particularly proud of a guided discovery task I came up with for introducing some of the more complex laws of indices to my Year 11 class two years ago. The worksheet looked like this:

[https://drive.google.com/file/d/1PfJjT058t55C_LR8LE1D3PaSRg9...](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1PfJjT058t55C_LR8LE1D3PaSRg9tY490/view?usp=drivesdk)

Nice, eh? Again, I ask the question: what could possibly go wrong? Well, quite a lot, as it turns out.

Take the laws of indices lesson. The best that can happen is that all students discover the laws of indices for themselves, leaving no gaps in their knowledge, nor developing any misconceptions, in a reasonable time frame. We can then proceed with the rest of the lesson, maybe moving on to application questions, or interleaving other topics into the examples (see Chapter 12), such as indices involving surds or fractions. How often does that actually happen? In my experience, literally never. What actually happens is that one or two students discover exactly what I wanted them to discover. They are feeling great about themselves, and rightly so –as we have seen in Chapter 2, success is motivating. A handful of students have some kind of idea what is going on, but with an eclectic mix of gaps in their knowledge and newly formed misconceptions. Some of these students are aware they have gaps and misconceptions, others are blissfully ignorant. And the rest of the students do not have a flipping clue what is going on. They are feeling confused and pretty down about themselves when they see their fellow classmates have figured it out. Any form of decent formative assessment strategy (Chapter 11) quickly reveals this disparity between levels of understanding, and as such I cannot move on with the lesson. So what do I inevitably end up doing? Teaching the laws of indices, of course! Maybe I will set those students who seem to have understood it off on the work I hoped everyone else would be moving on to –mind you, I would really like them to hear my explanation and do the worked examples, but how can I justify doing so when they have demonstrated their understanding? Hmmm…

Anyway, back to the rest of the class. By this stage, I am 30 minutes into a 50-minute lesson, rattling through a series of worked examples on the laws of indices far quicker and with much less care than I should. There is zero time for the students to practise their newly acquired skills and hence consolidate their knowledge, nor sufficient time for me to do any kind of application questions which would show them the full breadth of the topic.

But it is even worse than that. Even if I could somehow freeze time and spend those lost 30 minutes going through carefully structured and well-chosen worked examples, I am not back at square one. I am behind square one, because my students are no longer coming at the topic with fresh eyes. Many of those who failed to 'discover' the key relationships have already decided that indices are difficult, and yet another area of maths that they don't understand. It's going to take more than my magically retrieved 30 minutes to turn that one around._

\</comment><comment>--

Later the author describes how his approach has now changed to direct guidance. Of this approach he writes:

 _A common complaint I hear from teachers when I describe this approach is that students are not as actively involved as they would be during guided discovery. My response is that it depends on what you mean by active, and its anthesis, passive. If active students are ones making noise, working in groups, moving around the classroom, going about the task several different ways, getting some things right but plenty of things wrong, whereas passive students are sitting there quietly, thinking hard about the mathematics I am presenting, then I know which one I would prefer, especially at this early knowledge acquisition stage. For me, such 'activity' is exactly the poor proxy for learning that Coe (2013) warns us about. Students may well be active, but active doing what? What are they thinking about? What are they expanding their precious, limited working memory reserves on? During these demonstrations, my students are active in another sense. They are actively thinking hard about the matter in hand – or at least I am creating conditions to give them the very best chance of thinking hard about the matter in hand, and nothing else. Such activity is impossible to see, hence it is often dismissed as passivity and a lack of engagement. But periods of quiet contemplation like this are the key to learning, especially when we consider in greater depth the limits of working memory_

1] [https://www.amazon.com/How-Wish-Taught-Maths- conversations/d...](https://www.amazon.com/How-Wish-Taught-Maths- conversations/dp/1911382497)

<comment><USER16> Interesting. But it seems to me that the teacher is in a bind because of the assumption that it is necessary that all students learn the same things. If we really want everyone to have an interest in learning then we have to accommodate all the different abilities and interests that the students have. What the teaching profession has to be able to do is not to teach specific subjects but to enable the students to learn and somehow enthuse them to do it.

The problem is that then it is hard to measure the result. And in these days when quantifiability is regarded as the only necessary attribute of pretty much anything we end up falling back on measuring what we can rather than producing students who want to learn and are able to learn.

And when it comes to employment what most employers need is not someone with specific skills in mathematics or computer programming but someone who is willing to work, to improve, and to work with the rest of the department, someone who sees beyond narrow self interest.

<comment><USER17> > it seems to me that the teacher is in a bind because of the assumption that > it is necessary that all students learn the same things.

That's not the starting point. The starting point is that there is one teacher and many students. The necessity for student to learn the same thing derives from the impossibility for the teacher of teaching more than one thing at the same time.

> we have to accommodate all the different abilities and interests that the > students have

The craft of teaching is actually the opposite: it is to boil down the necessary priors for some specific learning to occur, and ruthlessly disregarding all other factors. If those priors are not in place you go back and teach them instead, recursively. It helps a lot obviously if students are grouped by current capabilities.

> What the teaching profession has to be able to do is not to teach specific > subjects but to enable the students to learn and somehow enthuse them to do > it.

Failure is demotivating; success is motivating. Motivation is baked into the pie.

> And in these days when quantifiability is regarded as the only necessary > attribute of pretty much anything we end up falling back on measuring what > we can rather than producing students who want to learn and are able to > learn.

In the world of education, quantifiability is absolutely 100% not a priority. If it was, successful approaches to instruction would have propagated long ago, instead of the typical aspirational mush that passes for analysis these days.

> And when it comes to employment what most employers need is not someone with > specific skills in mathematics or computer programming but someone who is > willing to work, to improve, and to work with the rest of the department, > someone who sees beyond narrow self interest.

They need both actually. Neither competence nor motivation alone will do the job. And frankly, it's somewhat going beyond your remit as an educator to decide what students should be motivated by. That's on them. The teacher's job is to teach.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Also relevant- (2004 pdf)

[https://app.nova.edu/toolbox/instructionalproducts/8001/EDD8...](https://app.nova.edu/toolbox/instructionalproducts/8001/EDD8001/SUM12/2004-Mayer.pdf)

But, yeah, I think anybody who has taught anything beyond the experiential discovers this. Mayers summarizes it as people have confused constructivist theories of learning with effective ways of teaching. We might learn through constructivism, but learning is more efficient if we _guide_ that construction.

<comment><USER19> I'm a former teacher and I disagree pretty strongly with the paper based on both my experience and on the fact that this paper has been pretty thoroughly gutted by the literature. The more specific you want the knowledge outputs to be, the more guidance you have to give, as a general rule, but inquiry-based approaches lead to something I call "white swan" learning (with apologies/thanks to Taleb). People often find something through the inquiry that they're enthusiastic about learning, and then they continue learning about that long after they've completed whatever was required. It's not something you can plan, and you don't know which or how many kids will find something with which project, but it happens reliably and for each of those kids finding that topic (and the joy and practice of learning something they are interested in in-depth) is far more effective than semesters of "normal" learning.

<comment><USER18> If you want your students to discover the Newton's second law you are going to have a hard time getting them to do so in a two-hour lab. It took Newton himself considerably longer, and he was actually deeply interested in the problem.

Inquiry does work well, but not without guidance, unless your sole outcome goal is the inquiry process itself. Even at the other end of the spectrum, the Ph.D. candidate or post-doc, things can get pretty miserable if they are poorly mentored.

So while I applaud you for helping develop natural curiosity (but does it stick? That's another question. Do those kids go on to ask more questions like you've started an engine in their minds, or two years later are they just like everybody else...), if you have curricular goals to meet such that their future classes depend on them knowing the content you are supposed to teach, guiding them is much more efficient.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Proof is watching average machinists struggle to get decent postable CNC machine instructions from the Autodesk 360 "free" CAM system. Well-trained machinists and college guys have no problems. But most would be better off manually programming.

</comment><comment><USER21> This paper is really fascinating (because one of my flatmates is a huge advocate for unguided learning). Do any newer papers like this exist? Maybe even one that shows that minimal guidance could be positive?

I'd love to read more.

<comment><AUTHOR> You may have already seen this but @sdrothrock posted this interesting counter-article that defends constructionism (minimal guidance).

<comment><AUTHOR> [https://bdld.blogspot.com/2011/06/five-years-later-review- of...](https://bdld.blogspot.com/2011/06/five-years-later-review-of- kirschner.html)

<comment><USER21> Thanks!</comment></comment></comment></comment>


United States of Secrets (Part Two) - <AUTHOR> https://video.pbs.org/video/2365250130/ <comment><AUTHOR> So in light of this, which BTW is pretty horrendous when one sees it laid out like this, does anyone publish "best practices" for the everyday citizen? Maybe EFF?

On the one extreme (my guess: 98% of the population) one shares anything and everything on social networks, no concept of encryption, or VPNs, lots of sensitive info sent unencrypted over email, location-enabled smartphone, etc etc.

On the other extreme I guess is the snowden/greenwald approach, only even boot into Tails onto a laptop that has been inspected for mal(hard)ware, only ever use Tor, always use PGP, never unencrypted email, etc. Only problem is that the everyday person cannot interface with the rest of society this way (e.g. their job).

So what are suggested best practices? ... and let's be realistic, the everyday person cannot for example host their own email (although I wish the day comes soon when this is possible)

<comment><USER2> For a completely average US citizen, I don't think NSA spying _has_ a practical impact today, at least directly -- it's almost all future risk. It's very serious future risk, that NSA will start to use its capabilities for entirely unlawful and immoral things (political activities, repression) vs. just spying on too many people when going after a smaller number of people.

So, the correct thing for average individuals today is to stop this from going farther -- not trying so much to mitigate the effects today. There are two main tools for the individual: politics, and commerce.

I'm willing to vote single-issue on reigning in NSA; I'd vote for Brian Schatz or Ted Cruz based on this single issue, even though I hate them otherwise.

As for commerce: I'll choose companies which resist spying activities (Google, Twitter, Sonic) over companies which cooperate completely (Telcos, eBay, etc.).

(legal challenges kind of fall in between; if I had the resources, I'd certainly fight vs. settle on these issues, individually or as a company, but it's not fair to expect others to do so)

If I were a foreigner, I wouldn't be able to directly influence US politics. I would lobby my government to end EU Safe Harbor and any other pressure they can put on the US Government, and to fix my own crazy data retention laws. And I'd probably prefer domestic companies, even when they also spy, just to put pressure on the US.

<comment><USER3> > For a completely average US citizen, I don't think NSA spying has a > practical impact today, at least directly -- it's almost all future risk.

While I think it's true. The keyword is direct. Though it should be mentioned that indirect impact is measurable, now.

> 1 in 6 writers has avoided writing or speaking on a topic they thought would > subject them to surveillance. Another 1 in 6 has seriously considered doing > so.

Source: [http://www.pen.org/chilling-effects](http://www.pen.org/chilling- effects)

<comment><USER4> I have seen this survey before and I have to say I am a little suspicious of how they came up with this pullquote. I do not understand how the 11% who responded "have seriously considered" is presented as "1 in 6 have seriously considered." This is from Question 12.a in the survey.[^1]

      12   Over the past year or two, have YOU done or seriously considered
           doing any of the following because you thought your communications
           might be monitored in some way by the government?

      12.a Avoided writing or speaking on a particular topic

      %% | Response
      </comment></comment></comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment>
      16 | Yes, have done
      11 | Have seriously considered
      70 | No, have not
       3 | Not sure/Not applicable
      ---+</comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment>--
      27 | NET Yes/Have seriously considered
      73 | NET No/Not sure

"Have seriously considered" is not even "1 in 6 respondents excluding the respondents that answered 'Yes, have done so.'"

I hope I am missing something obvious but as far as I currently understand the survey/math this quote is _fucking shameful._ Getting popular support for privacy protections is not going to happen by giving up the moral high ground. It is hard enough to fight against the "weak on security issues" label, it is going to be next to impossible to overcome "weak on security AND cannot be trusted to tell the truth."

[^1]: Page 24 [http://www.pen.org/sites/default/files/Chilling%20Effects_PE...](http://www.pen.org/sites/default/files/Chilling%20Effects_PEN%20American.pdf)

<comment><USER5> > "Have seriously considered" is not even "1 in 6 respondents excluding the > respondents that answered 'Yes, have done so.'"

Interesting. Yes, correctly excluding those 16, 11/84 isn't even close to 1/6\. Incorrectly dividing by the NO answers (11/73) is. I'm inclined to believe whoever came up with the quote made that mistake.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> PS if the link looks strange try [http://video.pbs.org/video/2365250130/](http://video.pbs.org/video/2365250130/)

(i.e. not https)

ironic

<comment><USER6> MP4 video stream, direct from the PBS CDN:

[SD] [http://ga.video.cdn.pbs.org/videos/frontline/69be704d-8ed9-4...](http://ga.video.cdn.pbs.org/videos/frontline/69be704d-8ed9-4ea5-80b9-be79f3e95ab6/133379/hd- mezzanine-16x9/b3fc5ae0_00003212-16x9-mp4-baseline.mp4)

[HD] [http://ga.video.cdn.pbs.org/videos/frontline/69be704d-8ed9-4...](http://ga.video.cdn.pbs.org/videos/frontline/69be704d-8ed9-4ea5-80b9-be79f3e95ab6/133379/hd- mezzanine-16x9/b3fc5ae0_00003212-16x9-mp4-2500k.mp4)

(It wasn't working for me, so I played with the Chrome debugger)

<comment><USER7> I was getting a 404 on the original link but these still loaded.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Why do they keep saying that ANY websites can track you through your cookies.

They also seem to imply that google purposefully made the PREF cookie so the NSA can use it to track people. If anything, google is a victim themselves here.

I love Frontline, but come on, this is just not accurate. Unless a lot of the things I understand about the browser is wrong.

Whenever I see inaccuracies in tech reporting, it makes me wonder if there are similar inaccuracies in other fields that I do not recognize because it's not my specialty..

<comment><USER9> If the NSA can track the request from your browser to the adsense/doubleclick servers, then they can track where you go around large parts of the Internet.

I didn't get the sense they were saying the NSA made Google make that cookie. Just that Google was denying that cookie was used for tracking, except 8 years ago when they said it was.

I suspect we don't fully understand the level of ability the NSA has to monitor a specific Internet user. It might be accurate to say that, if they want to track you, they will easily know every site you visit surfing around the web due to ad tracking cookies by all the various ad companies. I bet they can tie a Google PREF=ID to you by name and IP address.

<comment><USER8> Yes I understand that. And I agree the NSA is wrong for doing that. But I felt like the show is implying that google is purposefully doing it to allow the NSA to track you. When it seems to me that Google got outsmarted by the NSA.

<comment><USER10> Actually the summary of that whole segment seemed to simply be that, 1\. google is really good at tracking users 2\. NSA became very interested in that fact. 3\. NSA piggybacked on Google's tracking without them knowing.

I didn't get that they were saying google knew that the tracking cookie was being used in this way. Only that they were setting the example of how best to spy on people.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Includes:

Soltani: "A Personal Hit on Me" by Google

[http://video.pbs.org/video/2365249799/](http://video.pbs.org/video/2365249799/)

</comment><comment><USER12> We begin therefore where they are determined not to end, with the question whether any form of democratic self-government, anywhere, is consistent with the kind of massive, pervasive, surveillance into which the Unites States government has led not only us but the world.

This should not actually be a complicated inquiry.

[http://snowdenandthefuture.info/events.html](http://snowdenandthefuture.info/events.html)</comment>


Likely critical issues with Reddit's new ad supplier - <AUTHOR> https://old.reddit.com/r/bugs/comments/g78zj8/getting_forced_popups_from_reddit/ <comment><AUTHOR> Context: Users were reporting pop-ups being opened forcibly by some ads and an administrator of Reddit just admitted in a comment that they had no knowledge of the source and for that to stop it would likely require them contacting the ad supplier. Goes to show that (most likely)Reddit's administration team has no control over what ads are sent to them by this "supplier" and that third parties are potentially provided with a high level of access to client-side data.</comment>


3D Lightning Reconstruction (2013) - <AUTHOR> http://calculatedimages.blogspot.com/2013/05/3d-lightning.html <comment><USER2> Eric Bruning gave a good talk on this kind of stuff last year at SciPy [1]. His primary work seems to be focused on 3D lightning mapping using VHF antenna arrays - a slightly different approach than trying to take simultaneous pictures from multiple locations, but you get many more datapoints, especially in west Texas [2]. The downside is, you aren't getting a "true" 3D model of a single strike - rather, a 3D model of a storm based on the samples generated from the mapping data (IIRC)

[1] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Z17Q22HEMI](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Z17Q22HEMI)

[2] [http://pogo.tosm.ttu.edu/about/](http://pogo.tosm.ttu.edu/about/)

</comment><comment><USER3> _" It is immediately clear that they are taken from about the same direction but different heights: the second bolt looks squashed vertically."_

Isn't it also possible that the photos were taken at slightly different times and the path of the lightning bolt shifted slightly over that period?

For example, if you look at this 9-second video of a high voltage electrical arc[1], you'll see that its path shifts around quite a bit over time.

[1] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=euW4NerLAPg](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=euW4NerLAPg)

<comment><USER4> >Isn't it also possible that the photos were taken at slightly different times and the path of the lightning bolt shifted...

In the time it takes for the light from a lightning strike to fade, the bolt basically doesn't shift at all.

There's a guy called Tom A. Warner who shoots 7207 fps video of lightning; if you watch the first video on his page[1] you'll see that once the bolt reaches the ground, it's path doesn't change.

[1] [http://www.ztresearch.com/](http://www.ztresearch.com/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I'm still not sure how this was done. Here's what I have gathered so far from the post: The author has two images taken unknown location. He scaled them and then marked points on each. Then he matched up points on two images manually. Now he has dx and dy for each point on one image, relative to other. Now he asserts that bigger dx means nearer to camera. So I'm thinking he takes some proportionality constant to get z = c * dx.

But wouldn't that produce pretty arbitrary shape depending on value of c?

<comment><USER6> A question I had was how he made the correspondences between points in the two bolts. I have a hunch that he just traversed the two lightning bolts separately and said point 1 in A corresponds to point 1 in B, ... Point N in A corresponds to point N in B, etc. if this is the case, you would expect dx and dy to grow as from top to bottom and hence his reconstructed depth to become closer from top to bottom, which is what happens.

<comment><USER7> Why would you expect the bottom of the lightning bolt pictures to be more different, just because he started labeling points from the top?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I like how it has a shadow.</comment>


Coups, lies, dirty tricks: Stewart Copeland on his CIA agent father (2000) - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/music/2020/aug/05/stewart-copeland-father-miles-cia-spy-the-police <comment><USER2> Interesting that he said everything his father taught him was confirmed by history books. Well, there's history books and history books.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, I certainly don't remember my high school textbook mentioning anything about how America's CIA-led foreign policy should be considered explicitly "amoral." Even here you get the usual spook dissembling from Miles Copeland -- it's plainly _immoral_.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> > "Guys, 70 years have gone by! The current regime of Iran was not chosen by > the CIA. It's what happened when the Iranians chose their system of > governance. For right or wrong, it's theirs."

Really? The current regime in Iran and the fate of that country was a direct consequence of exactly what came before that. And that throughout the Middle East.

That line of thinking is, honestly, either dumb or simply ignorant. But I guess not as stated:

"My father's view was that democracy was like two wolves and a sheep voting on what's for dinner," says Stewart, "and indeed in the Arab world it's very much like that. My father wasn't in the business of exporting democracy. He was in the business of getting the oil to the west by hook or by crook."

<comment><USER4> It is simply dumb. The CIA certainly didn't want Khomeini in power, but him being elected is certainly a direct consequence of the CIA toppling their democracy.

<comment><USER5> I would hesitate to call anything concerning human actions a direct consequence if there is 25 years between the cause and its result.

on edit: instead of repeating the same thing in each response berating me for not accepting that it was a consequence I will put the additional response here

I didn't say it wasn't a consequence, but a direct consequence is generally understood as "an effect that is an immediate result of an event, incident, or occurrence."

[https://itlaw.wikia.org/wiki/Direct_consequence](https://itlaw.wikia.org/wiki/Direct_consequence)

[https://www.iadclexicon.org/direct- consequence/](https://www.iadclexicon.org/direct-consequence/)

although it is often used for rhetorical effect in cases where the consequence is obviously not direct, I just avoid the usage unless I believe it is direct.

<comment><USER4> Well, they toppled the democratically elected leader and installed the last Shah who was more open to let western powers access their oil. The revolutionary forces 25 years later directly stated they felt justified to get rid of the Shah because of foreign intervention.

Would you easily forgive a country that installed a Shah by toppling the democratically elected leader to get access to oil? Would you forget if you live day by day under a government directly installed by foreign actors? I don't think so, so I think it is a very safe bet in this case.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Loved his music, never realized he had that much else going on.

<comment><USER7> You might enjoy his autobiography, Strange Things Happen, which mostly skirts around The Police. Very enjoyable.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> "Guys, 70 years have gone by! The current regime of Iran was not chosen by the CIA."

Indeed, it was more of a MI6 job [https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/aug/02/mi6-the- coup-i...](https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/aug/02/mi6-the-coup-in-iran- that-changed-the-middle-east-and-the-cover-up)

</comment><comment><USER9> > My Dad the Spy, an Audible Original Podcast, is available to download from > Audible.co.uk

I'd like to hear this, but I'm not subscribing to Audible for it.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Famous musical artists with spook upbringings are one gigantic rabbit hole once you peek inside: [https://centerforaninformedamerica.com/laurelcanyon/](https://centerforaninformedamerica.com/laurelcanyon/)</comment>


The Tyranny of the Clock – Ivan Sutherland (2012) [pdf] - <AUTHOR> http://worrydream.com/refs/Sutherland%20-%20Tyranny%20of%20the%20Clock.pdf <comment><USER2> In the networking world Fulcrum built some very low latency switch chips used in switch routers using asynchronous logic. The Alta switch chip was the last of that generation.

[http://www.hotchips.org/wp- content/uploads/hc_archives/hc23/...](http://www.hotchips.org/wp- content/uploads/hc_archives/hc23/HC23.19.6-Networking/HC23.19.620-Frame- Pipeline-Davies-Fulcrum-proceedings.pdf)

Intel acquired Fulcrum and has not had a new product. One can speculate that they were acquired in part for their experience and tool to design asynchronous pipelines.

In the DSP world Octasic makes DSPs that use asynchronous desisns:

[http://www.octasic.com/technology/opus-dsp- architecture](http://www.octasic.com/technology/opus-dsp-architecture)

<comment><USER3> The Fulcrum/Intel FM10000 was released but it didn't get much love.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> >> Imagine what software would be like if subroutines could start and end only at preset time intervals. "My subroutines all start at 3.68 millisecond intervals; how often do yours start?"

Mine start at 50 microsecond intervals. I've worked on stuff with shorter and longer intervals. Sometimes we have lists of tasks that need to run at different rates, so scheduling becomes a real pain. Welcome to the world of real time embedded software in high performance systems. The same thing applies, we make sure the worst case execution time is within the allowed intervals and use a master clock to sync everything up.

<comment><USER5> I've done quite a few of these embedded systems with real time constraints and your summary is quite accurate. The good part for me is that once you have things nailed down they (usually, and if not then you're really in for a long night) don't shift and what works will continue to work reliably.

This in contrast to non-real-time systems which tend to just freeze for random periods of time (sometimes seconds or even minutes) without any apparent cause. That's something that really puzzles me about todays software+hardware. In theory it should all be faster than ever but in practice I spend as much or even more time waiting for my computers than I ever did in the past.

Maybe I'm just more impatient but I don't believe that's the reason here.

Real time should be the norm, not the exception, just like encrypted communications should be the norm, not the exception.

Computers should respond without noticeable latency to user input at all times.

<comment><USER6> Remember moving your cursor through menu options in an NES game? (or using a 8-bit word processor?) Computers should be like that. Consumers shouldn't accept anything else.

Responsive interfaces allow users to develop muscle memory.

I used to type in complicated sequences of commands into my commodore 64 to perform common actions. (wow, I didn't know I wanted a $HOME with some scripts in it. Now I know!)

When I'd make a typo in one of those sequences, it would commonly be quicker for me to reset the machine and start from the top.

If I performed the same action twice (with a reset inbetween) and got a different result, I could logically conclude that I had a hardware problem. (Not every HW problem is permanent. Heat and grounding problems can both be fixed, unless some threshold is crossed...)

Anyway, I figure that Wintel denied grandma that kind of computer because they learned from the hobbyists that neophyte users with quality hardware+software will exceed the creators in skill in less time than it takes to design the next gen rig--and a couple genius users will start building their own out of impatience!

There's no profit in quality hardware+software combinations.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Asynchronous logic is significantly more power efficient, so it may be one approach to "save Moore's Law" (for one generation perhaps). But it would probably require some company that really cares about power efficiency, doesn't care about industry best practices, and is willing to risk hundreds of millions in R&D.

<comment><USER7> People have been poking at it for over 30 years now.

I'm scratching it up to "it's the future, and always will be ..."

<comment><USER8> People have been poking at every architecture improvement for 30 years. Moore's Law makes it clear that the only winning move is to go into the most popular path.

Now that Moore's Law is on its way out, people can actually try new things, and discover what pays off and what does not.

<comment><USER9> This could also be a chance to figuratively reboot computing tech, and start anew from different fundamentals: quaternary, biological, photonic...

What may have been hard to implement 30-40 years ago may be easier now with current technology. Some of these could definitely supplement existing binary/boolean silicon in certain domains if not replace it, like using actual brains in AI-as-a-Service, for image recognition and so on,

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> This reminded me of one of Gustafson's reasoning for change in how numerical computations are done - currently used principles of hw architecture result in hw wasting lots of energy and time, mostly in the process where numbers get from RAM to CPU and back. It seems more people already realize this, which is good. I hope to see some general purpose hw inspired by these ideas of efficient computation.

<comment><USER11> The inefficiency you are talking about is not due to the fact that there is a synchronous clock (within each individual "block", since there needs to be some async logic going between the different clock domains of DRAM and the processor). The waste in getting numbers from RAM to the register file is primarily due to the hardware managed cache hierarchy, which we are addressing at REX Computing, along with John Gustafson as an advisor.

<comment><USER12> Waste? Or overhead in exchange for having a cache?

<comment><USER11> Obviously tooting my own horn here, but our solution is replacing hardware managed caches with software managed caches... You get to have larger, lower latency "caches" of SRAM in our solution, that also use less power in moving data from RAM to the register file through them since we very granularly control the hierarchy.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Handshake Technology: [http://www.ispd.cc/slides/slides_backup/ispd06/8-2.pdf](http://www.ispd.cc/slides/slides_backup/ispd06/8-2.pdf)

Warning: Slightly commercial in nature. But some good information about how it works starting on page 4. Worth reading from there.

</comment><comment><USER14> A few months ago there was another discussion here of an older article of his on the same topic [1].

Archive.org has some of their old FLEET architecture papers and slide decks: [2]

[1] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11425533](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11425533)

[2] [https://web.archive.org/web/20120227072220/http://fleet.cs.b...](https://web.archive.org/web/20120227072220/http://fleet.cs.berkeley.edu/)

</comment><comment><USER6> Hm, I came up with this idea independently, 5 < years < 10 ago, after reading the first third of _Code: The Hidden Language of Computer Hardware and Software_.

Neat!

I just figured that you could redesign common ICs so that they had a new wire akin to the "carry" bit. I called it the 'done' wire, and I figured you could just tie it to the CLK of the next IC. Ya know? So 'doneness' would propagate across the surface of the motherboard (or SoC) in different ways depending on the operation it was performing. Rather than the CLK signal, which is broadcast to all points...

(I know that my idea is half baked and my description is worse. I'm glad I found this PDF!)

I knew the big advantage would be power savings. I called the idea 'slow computing', and I envisioned an 8-bit style machine that would run on solar or a hand crank and be able to pause mid calculation until enough power was available... Just like a old capacitor-based flash camera will be able to flash more frequently when you have fresh batteries in it.

You'd just wire the power system up with the logic. Suppose an adder fires a "done" at some other IC. Now, put your power system inline, like MiTM... When it gets the "done", it charges that capacitor (a very small one? :) ) and only when enough power is available does it propagate the "done". ...Maybe the "done" powers the next IC. I dunno.

As I said, half baked. Glad to find out that I'm not the only one that dreamed of 'clockless', though!

<comment><USER15> The big issue with the done signal you're referring to is how do you generate it? In other words, how does the circuit "know" that it's finished execution?

There are several options. One is to simply add a delay element to each circuit that is matched to the circuit's delay. Another is to use a circuit- level handshaking protocol, similar to that used in TCP.

It's not an easy thing to tackle and leads to performance loss in the long run relative to a synchronous design.

<comment><USER6> I don't understand. It's clear to me when an adder is 'done'. Hm, so I'm guessing it does get more complicated than that. :)

<comment><USER15> Yes you're right, in the case of an adder it's pretty straightforward. It can get complicated in other circuits.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> For those interested in asynchronous circuit design, this group is one of the best in the world in the field.

[http://www.cs.columbia.edu/async/](http://www.cs.columbia.edu/async/)

<comment><USER16> Any recommended links or papers to get a sense of the state of the art?

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> There doesn't seem to be any sign of recent activity on the asynchronous research center site affiliated with the article. Is anyone aware of currently active academic or industrial research groups in this field?

</comment><comment><USER18> I would personally love try to design some fancy asynchronous stuff, but I got the impression the impression that current FPGAs would make this difficult.

</comment><comment><USER19> do the ARM Amulet research efforts which came out of Manchester University fall under this? [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AMULET_microprocessor](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AMULET_microprocessor)

</comment><comment><USER20> Just forwarded this off to my EE colleagues.

I'm for approaches that may be superior overall.

</comment><comment><USER21> I apprechiated the read.

Didn't understand it though.</comment>


Aaron Swartz - <AUTHOR> http://www.economist.com/news/obituary/21569674-aaron-swartz-computer-programmer-and-activist-committed-suicide-january-11th-aged-26-aaron?frsc=dg%7Ca

<comment><USER2> _If people bring so much courage to this world the world has to kill them to break them, so of course it kills them. The world breaks every one and afterward many are strong at the broken places. But those that will not break it kills. It kills the very good and the very gentle and the very brave impartially. If you are none of these you can be sure it will kill you too but there will be no special hurry._ \-- Ernest Hemingway

:(

<comment><USER3> Some of the great minds in history have accepted this fact and viewed death as a very real possibility by adopting views deemed radical by society.

But they saw a strong enough morality in what they were doing to perceiver.

This dates as far back in human history lore such as in the bible. And probably well before that.

Human societies always seems to be well structured to suppress radical thought. I'm curious if the internet is changing that.

<comment><USER4> A very radical thought in our context would be suggesting that Aaron Swartz is not actually dead, but instead staged his suicide. I realize for a man who _is_ probably dead, that is a _very_ terrible thought to think. But given the fact that the last words on Aaron's last blog post are "STAGED SUICIDE" don't we owe it to somebody like Aaron to think outside the box?

Other stupid points include: 0\. Footer "I'm not dead yet!" on <http://www.aaronsw.com/2002/continuity> not updated as per instructions 1\. Batman last blog post also seems out of place in anonymous warhead video (tribute by anon to Swartz?) 2\. Supreme court justices always a point of fascination for Swartz ("warhead names"). (tribute?) 3\. Aarons ArkAngel name of poster of the youtube anonymous warhead video (tribute?) 4\. Friend says discussed w/ swartz what public reaction to his suicide might be (bizarre!) at first eulogy 5\. Weird green times font on black bg in ussc.gov hack uniquely reminiscent of style of Swartz's blog and possibly due to his near sightedness. 6\. "A 24 Puzzle" blog post by Aaron very closely describes the situation he is in now having to send out sensitive documents to reliable sites while under pressure (but way back in March 4, 2009) 7\. Takes about 6 months to a year to prepare and execute the hack of ussc.gov and related sites, why did preparation coincide with suicide? (random chance?) 8\. Anon message on ussc.gov has very similar cadences to swartz's extremely unique writing style "succinct".

So I took the liberty while procrastinating of running stylometric software: [http://www.philocomp.net/?pageref=humanities&page=signat...](http://www.philocomp.net/?pageref=humanities&page=signature) on a downloaded corpora of Aaron Swartz's and Paul Graham's Blog posts and the ussc.gov anon message: [https://mega.co.nz/#!9gc13bhK!DtetrAmSyTrEChK7vViMNnBbS- doTH...](https://mega.co.nz/#!9gc13bhK!DtetrAmSyTrEChK7vViMNnBbS- doTHWPywI24tA64Vc) As you can see it easily distinguishes between randomly chosen books by Jane Austen and Charles Dickens and it also tells who wrote the 54th federalist paper (Madison not Hamilton): [http://imageshack.us/a/img838/927/austenvsdickensfederali.pn...](http://imageshack.us/a/img838/927/austenvsdickensfederali.png)

The results show that Aaron Swartz is more likely to have written the ussc.gov message than Paul Graham: [http://img585.imageshack.us/img585/843/swartzvsgrahamresults...](http://img585.imageshack.us/img585/843/swartzvsgrahamresults.png)

I don't have time to review how the statistics work or how "keywords work". So it is _very_ likely I'm doing this all wrong. Here is the seminal paper by Mosteller and Wallace on their identification of the author of the federalist papers (Ironically from JSTOR): [http://www.scribd.com/doc/122904915/INFERENCE-IN-AN- AUTHORSH...](http://www.scribd.com/doc/122904915/INFERENCE-IN-AN-AUTHORSHIP- PROBLEM)

Presumably now you need to download corpora online from other authors like Kevin Poulsen and see if Aaron is always a likelier candidate than all of them, but I don't have anymore time right now and I'm only doing this half heartedly. Maybe someone else who's bored can try it?

<comment><USER5> Could you please stop this?

You do realize he was found dead by his uncle?

Are you seriously suggesting his uncle and the NYC medical examiner are part of some conspiracy?

There is enough madness in this world to intentionally add to it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Please sign the petition to oust Assistant U.S. Attorney Steve Heymann at [https://petitions.whitehouse.gov/petition/fire-assistant- us-...](https://petitions.whitehouse.gov/petition/fire-assistant-us-attorney- steve-heymann/RJKSY2nb). It needs 14K more signatures by Feb. 11, so share it.

Regardless what you may think of the petition's wording, no one should be allowed to continue to do what's obviously wrong with impunity. Ortiz (Heymann's boss) has indicated that she has no intention of stopping extorting plea bargains from defendants with threats of imprisonment and fines grossly disproportionate to the actual crime.

<comment><USER7> Do you know what happened to the petition signed to oust Ortiz . Has the whitehouse responded to that?

<comment><USER8> Demand Progress posted this [1] and sent it out to all its subscribers today, to urge the government to stop stonewalling on the Ortiz issue.

[1] [http://act.demandprogress.org/sign/wh_ortiz/?akid=1973.22538...](http://act.demandprogress.org/sign/wh_ortiz/?akid=1973.2253878.Q49nLK&rd=1&t=2)

<comment><USER7> A petition for the petition.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Call your Congressperson and urge them to pass Aaron's Law.

Aaron's Law is in the process of being introduced and debated by members of Congress.

The bill would fix the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA) to prevent the type of prosecutorial abuse that led to the death of Aaron Swartz.

Aaron's Law is being introduced by Congresswoman Zoe Lofgren and is only two pages long.

You can view a draft here: <http://1.usa.gov/13DlJj4>

Call your Congressperson and tell him or her to support Aaron's Law now. Then spread the word.

Here's one easy way to call:

<http://phonebank.org/aaronslaw>

Note: My good friend from the '08 Obama campaign started this site.

<comment><USER10> Actually, "Aaron's Law" would not have materially changed the prosecution in this case.

Yet again, a law named after a person is a hastily constructed, poorly thought-out, bad idea. Has there ever been a counterexample to that rule?

<comment><USER11> Taren endorsed Aaron's Law in her eulogy, or at least in the transcript I read. I assume she'd read it first.

<comment><USER12> In SF at the memorial she mentioned it as a good try but not good enough.

<comment><USER11> Aha, thanks for the update. The one at the Internet Archive? I watched her speech last night (and her tearjerking poetry reading at the end) but I don't remember anything about that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Probably like a lot of people, I'm addicted to reading these articles now. I had a lot of respect for Aaron when he was still here, and even though he's gone now, it's encouraging that his actions continue to inspire so many people to make change for the better. The Economist did a really good job on this.

And I have to imagine Aaron would have laughed too when he heard them call Perl an "elegant langauge".

<comment><USER14> I, too, chuckled at this.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I read a bunch of Aaron Swartz obituary articles and blog posts, both professional and amateur, yet this is the first time I've encountered the actual name of the script he ran to download the JSTOR documents: keepgrabbing.py

<comment><USER14> Eh, it's details. Something that really wasn't important or big. But, I do agree with you. It did stand out.

<comment><USER8> Agreed. But since I wasn't expecting anything new in terms of information from a standard news outlet, I was pleasantly surprised.

<comment><USER15> The Economist is anything but a "standard" or ordinary news outlet.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Leave it to the economist to write the best obituary. RIP.

<comment><USER11> Taren's made me cry, and Carl Malamud's fired me up. By comparison this one is blah.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> "theft was theft, said the prosecution."

No, they said "stealing is stealing" - they didn't charge him with theft because he didn't take anything physical.

duplicating data != depriving someone of their property.

EDIT: sorry, this sounds harsh. apart from this one sentence, the article is great.

</comment><comment><USER17> "using a small, elegant language called perl" - The Economist.

</comment><comment><USER18> Is anyone else equally excited to see what's on his hard drive? Is that already available?

<comment><USER19> I read the link and came here also to ask this question. I cant find it on google anywhere where anyone has any info about this.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Curious... Anyone have a link to the JSTOR data or PACER system that Aaron uploaded to the Web?</comment>


RedisConf - <AUTHOR> http://redisconf.com/

<comment><USER3> What could one expect at such a conf? I'm interested in this one, but historically, most tech conferences I've attended have always seemed rather light on content. If anyone has some insight on what to expect, though, I'd love to be sold on it.

<comment><USER4> Hi, Adam from &yet here. We're organizing redisconf. We also organize krtconf (<http://2012.krtconf.com>).

We're putting together the Redis event for the same reason we organized krtconf: we wanted to go to something like it and it didn't exist yet. We're developers first, so we're curating the content we most want to hear.

We worked hard for months proactively putting together the content for krtconf and here's the schedule as it ended up for last year: <http://2011.krtconf.com/schedule/>

We're still early in the content planning process, but just so you have an idea of the kind of effort we intend to put into the first RedisConf, here's what some folks said about the first krtconf:

"The quality of the talks is going to influence the quality of the conversations. The talks here have been great and the conversations have been even better." - Mikeal Rogers, Nodeconf / Pouch

"krtconf has been amazing. It's a melding of the minds." - Kyle Drake, Geoloqi

"krtconf 2011 was impressively polished. Thanks so much for putting on the conference. I had a great time and would love to attend again. the conference was excellent, and I really appreciated how much work you guys put in." - <USER2> Smith, Derby.js

"Seriously awesome conference." - Pradeep Elankumarn, Kicksend

"Just wanted to say thanks for an awesome time. Really enjoyed the conference, the speakers and giving my talk. I have no doubt this will be the first of many Krtconfs." - Owen Barnes, Socketstream

"The conference has exceeded my expectations." - Astro (github.com/astro)

<comment><USER3> Thanks so much! This definitely appeals to me.

We're using redis in some very high-traffic contexts, and our usage is only increasing, so I'm on the look out for resources. RedisConf sounds quite interesting so far.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I'd rather see a Redis BoF at a USENIX conference, or something along those lines.</comment>